United States

Evidence from studies of knowledge revision show the refutation text is an effective tool for helping readers correct their inaccurate understandings. While refutation shows immediate benefits in group comparisons, it is unclear whether these benefits are restricted to particular retention intervals, if these benefits generalize across topics, or what predicts knowledge revision following refutation. In the present study, participants evaluated misconceptions across various science topics, then read a mix of refutation and expository texts and were prompted to rate their surprise and confusion after each text. Participants then re-evaluated the misconceptions immediately after reading the texts and again at a two-week delay. While both texts reduced misconception endorsement, refutation texts lead to a greater reduction in misconception endorsement on both the immediate posttest and at a two-week delay. Finally, exploratory analyses suggest participants&#39; ratings of surprise predicted knowledge revision and partially mediated the effect of text type on knowledge revision.

CogSci 2025

Overcoming Science Misconceptions: When is Refutation an Effective Tool for Knowledge Revision?

instruction and teaching

learning

psychology

reading

Evidence from studies of knowledge revision show the refutation text is an effective tool for helping readers correct their inaccurate understandings. While refutation shows immediate benefits in group comparisons, it is unclear whether these benefits are restricted to particular retention intervals, if these benefits generalize across topics, or what predicts knowledge revision following refutation. In the present study, participants evaluated misconceptions across various science topics, then read a mix of refutation and expository texts and were prompted to rate their surprise and confusion after each text. Participants then re-evaluated the misconceptions immediately after reading the texts and again at a two-week delay. While both texts reduced misconception endorsement, refutation texts lead to a greater reduction in misconception endorsement on both the immediate posttest and at a two-week delay. Finally, exploratory analyses suggest participants' ratings of surprise predicted knowledge revision and partially mediated the effect of text type on knowledge revision.

poster

### Welcome to CogSci Conference 2025!

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was a hybrid meeting held in San Francisco. 

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The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education.

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The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

Manipulated visual information recalibrates proprioception in which participants perceive their body parts to be at a different location from their actual position in the body. Previous studies have provided direct visual information regarding the manipulated position of the body parts, which have often been the limbs in this context. In our experiments, we manipulated the location of the viewpoint and/or the virtual right arm during the training session. The viewpoint corresponds to the position of the head, indicating the position of the trunk connected to the head. The results of the experiments showed that this indirect visual information could cause a proprioceptive recalibration of the trunk, a very fundamental body part. In addition, a comparison with the arm, for which direct visual information was provided, suggests that the recalibration of the trunk in the absence of direct visual information was weaker than that of the arm.

Proprioceptive Recalibration by Moving Viewpoint: The Effect of Indirect Positional Information of Torso

In adults, the contribution of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus to memory encoding varies depending on the type of information being learned. Because these regions are still developing in children, their contribution to the formation of memories for different types of associations may differ from that of adults. Here, we examined how semantic and perceptual similarity between items affects memory behaviour and neural engagement in children (6-7 years) and adults. Participants completed a pair learning task during functional magnetic resonance imaging, in which pairs were perceptually or semantically related. Memory was tested outside the scanner with cued recall. Semantic similarity facilitated recall in both age groups, but more so in adults. Neurally, semantic pairs elicited broad frontoparietal activity while perceptual pairs engaged ventral visual and lateral prefrontal areas. Children showed more distinct neural responses to semantic versus perceptual pairs than adults, as well as more engagement in anterior hippocampus for semantic than perceptual pairs. These findings suggest that semantic similarity provides a powerful scaffold for memory across development, with age-related changes in memory encoding marked by a shift toward reliance on more integrated neural systems.

Neural Signatures of Semantic and Perceptual Memory Formation Become More Similar Across Development

Transferring knowledge to new situations is essential for learning (Gentner, 2003) but notoriously difficult (Gick & Holyoak, 1983). In computer science education, students are expected to transfer knowledge of earlier taught block-based programming languages (e.g., Scratch) when they transition to more challenging text-based languages (e.g., Python). However, still little is known about whether and how students engage in such transfer. To explore these ideas, we developed an assessment for late-elementary and middle-school students proficient in Scratch that provides brief instruction on similarities with a novel text-language (Python) for various concepts (conditionals, iteration, etc.). Students were then assessed as to whether they could transfer their knowledge to conceptually related problems in Python. Results indicate students struggle in transferring most concepts, particularly those with syntactic differences. These findings are consistent with ACT-R theory (Anderson & Schunn, 2000) and suggest students may benefit from targeted transfer support when learning new programming languages.

Capturing Student’s Spontaneous Knowledge Transfer Between Block and Text-Based Programming Languages

Public health data highlight disease outcome disparities corresponding to age, social class, and race, which are due to biological, behavioral, and/or structural factors (depending on the disparity). We examined whether adults are aware of these disparities and how they explain them. This study recruited U.S. adults (N = 241) through Mechanical Turk and examined whether they thought that there was a relation between social categories and illness. We examined their judgments and explanations for transmitting and contracting COVID-19 or the common cold. We found that adults thought that older adults and poor people were more likely than younger adults and rich people to get sick, whereas younger adults were more likely than older adults to transmit disease. People relied on biological explanations for disparities due to age, and structural explanations for disparities due to social class. However, the results for race were more mixed, suggesting that people do not always assume that social categories are related to illness.

U.S. adults’ beliefs and explanations about health disparities

Previous work has suggested that category labels can facilitate faster rates of category learning. To better understand the role that labels play in this phenomenon, the present study investigates whether this labeling advantage coincides with a warping of representational space that is indicative of categorical perception. To this end, we collected behavioral and EEG data during two tasks: an approach-avoid task in which category boundaries are learned and a same-different task. The behavioral results replicate the labeling advantage in category learning and suggest that CP effects are strengthened by the influence of labels. Representational similarity analyses of EEG brain activity collected during the approach-avoid task provide additional support for this theory, showing that stimulus representations exhibit patterns of representational warping that are characteristic of CP when the labeling advantage is most prominent. Together, these findings contribute to a richer understanding of how labels facilitate category learning.

Labels Facilitate Categorical Perception Effects during Novel Category Learning

Baby-schema is a social perception phenomenon describing how infantile facial features and their abstract representation in animals and objects automatically engage human caregiving responses. While often considered universal, its cross-cultural variability remains untested outside large-scale industrialized communities. Does cultural background and visual experience influence perceptual and behavioral biases of baby-schema?

We examined responses to manipulated infant faces in two Indigenous Malaysian (Batek, Temiar) and an urban German community. In a pre-registered eye-tracking task, participants viewed human and cat face pairs differing only in baby-schema-level (high vs. low) and completed a pre-registered binary forced-choice task. Germans selected high baby-schema faces as more likable, cuter, younger, and healthier, while small-scale communities showed attenuated or absent effects and were less sensitive to baby-schema manipulations in a control discrimination-task. Eye-tracking showed cultural differences in gaze patterns that were not meaningfully influenced by species or baby-schema-level. A follow-up study will investigate effects of group membership.

Cultural Variability in Baby-Schema Perception: Insights on Face Perception from Two Small-Scale Malaysian and An Urban German Community

When facing tasks that are difficult to solve optimally, people can construct simplifying strategies that trade off utility with cost (Ho et al., 2022, Callaway et al., 2022). How we do so is an open question, especially in domains with large, structured strategy spaces where strategy evaluation itself is costly. One proposal is that people select strategies without much online computation, by a process of (reinforcement) learning through experience (Lieder & Griffiths, 2017). We present an alternative, resource-rational metareasoning framework that integrates strategy learning with adaptively bounded amounts of online strategy evaluation. We compare these proposals using a new video game task in which players traverse a grid of moving colored tiles while respecting complex rules about valid color sequences. Players quickly discover simplifying strategies, such as “only step on red tiles,” and adapt when the environment changes to favor new strategies, in ways that are most consistent with adaptive metareasoning.

Strategy selection in complex tasks through adaptive integration of learned and online metareasoning

Human behavior is determined by both learned habits and prospective planning. Because planning is computationally expensive, humans face two meta-control challenges: They must determine when to plan and, if so, which potential futures to consider. We propose that habit learning itself could solve these meta-control problems by prioritizing which futures to explore and to what extent. We show how this notion emerges from a normative Bayesian model and test one of the resulting predictions empirically. To do so, we developed a behavioral paradigm that operationalizes model-based planning as spatial navigation through a maze. Our findings suggest that humans indeed incorporate learned habitual information during planning in a manner closely aligned with the Bayesian model. This corroborates existing reinforcement learning accounts and contributes a normative and unifying perspective.

How Habit Learning Guides Planning: A Normative View and Behavioral Evidence

Prior research suggests that learning novel faces with identity-relevant semantic information is beneficial for face encoding, increasing face discriminability on recognition tasks even when tested using a different image (Mattarozzi et al., 2019; Ünal, Akan & Benjamin, 2024). However, no study has yet examined whether the timing of semantic information presentation is important for this effect by comparing conditions where semantic information is presented either before or after seeing the face. Sixty-two young adults learned a series of 36 faces of which 24 were paired with semantic information (12 face-first, 12 semantic-first) and 12 were not (control). We found that participants showed significantly better discriminability (d’) for identities learned in the semantic-first condition compared to the face-first condition. These findings suggest that learning identity-relevant semantic information before seeing a face can optimize face memory, likely by increasing the salience of the face and providing a semantic scaffolding to bolster identity encoding.

Order Matters: Learning semantic information before seeing a face improves face memory

People exhibit systemic biases in their judgment and decision-making, and these biases are often presumed to operate outside of awareness. Nevertheless, there are surprisingly few direct empirical examinations of this question. Here, in two studies (total N = 727), we test participants’ awareness of 11 classic biases. Participants completed a series of tasks, each inducing one bias (e.g., the anchoring effect, decoy effect, halo effect, etc.), and then reported whether and how they believed they were influenced by each bias. We found that, aggregating across tasks, participants’ reports tracked how much they were actually influenced by each bias (with correlations between 0.3 - 0.45), indicating significant awareness. There were also substantial individual differences, with many participants exhibiting near-perfect awareness. This research argues against the notion that people are inherently unaware of their decision-making biases, and instead supports views that place conscious processing closer to the center of human decision-making.

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Proprioceptive Recalibration by Moving Viewpoint: The Effect of Indirect Positional Information of Torso

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Proprioceptive Recalibration by Moving Viewpoint: The Effect of Indirect Positional Information of Torso

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